10 Free Tools For Effective Project Management

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Project management is the process by which projects are defined, planned, monitored, controlled and delivered such that the agreed benefits are realised. Projects are unique, transient endeavours undertaken to achieve a desired outcome. Projects bring about change and project management is recognised as the most efficient way of managing such change. It includes the techniques & tools used to describe, control & deliver a series of activities with given deliverables, timeframes & budgets.

With increased demand of project management in all areas in general and software industry in particular, need for better tools to manage softwares effectively is also increasing.
A good and effective project management should be fast and robust and should contain features like:

Scheduling

Cost Control

Budget Management

Resource Allocation

Collaboration

Communication

Documentation

In this article, we will specifically discuss 10 tools that are free and you can choose among them as your project management tool.

OpenProj is a free, open source desktop alternative to Microsoft Project. The OpenProj solution is ideal for desktop project management and is available on Linux, Unix, Mac or Windows. OpenProj is a complete desktop replacement of Microsoft Project and even opens existing native Project files. OpenProj shares the most advanced scheduling engine in the industry with Projects On Demand. The OpenProj solution has Gantt Charts, Network Diagrams (PERT Charts), WBS and RBS charts, Earned Value costing and more.

dotProject is a web-based, multi-user, multi-language Project Management application. It is an open-source software and free for any uses and is maintained by an open community of volunteer programmers. Key features include:

GanttProject is a free and easy to use Gantt chart based project scheduling and management tool. Major features include Task hierarchy and dependencies, Gantt chart, Resource load chart, Generation of PERT chart, PDF and HTML reports, MS Project import/export and WebDAV based groupwork management.

PHProjekt is a free open source modular application for the coordination of group activities and to share informations and document via the web.
Components of PHProjekt include Group Calendar, Project Management, Time Card System, File Management, Contact Manager, Mail Client and many other.

ConsultComm is a small, lightweight, platform-independent program written in Java that allows anyone managing multiple projects, clients or tasks to effectively keep track of exactly how long they’ve worked on each project. Key features include:

Easily integrated into your existing time management or billing system; JDBC support is included so you can instantly upload all your times and projects into most JDBC and ODBC compliant databases

Platform-independent, so you can unify all your OS X, Windows, Linux and Solaris workstations with a single application

Released as open source, so you don’t have to worry about vendor lock-in or customization problems.

Quickly extensible by utilizing plugins created using the standard JavaBeans framework. Users and other developers can easily create their own plugins to quickly add custom functionality to ConsultComm

TaskJuggler is a modern and powerful, Open Source project management tool. Its new approach to project planing and tracking is more flexible and superior to the commonly used Gantt chart editing tools. It has already been successfully used in many projects and scales easily to projects with hundreds of resources and thousands of tasks.

TaskJuggler is project management software for serious project managers. It covers the complete spectrum of project management tasks from the first idea to the completion of the project. It assists you during project scoping, resource assignment, cost and revenue planing, risk and communication management.

TaskJuggler provides an optimizing scheduler that computes your project time lines and resource assignments based on the project outline and the constraints that you have provided. The built-in resource balancer and consistency checker offload you from having to worry about irrelevant details and ring the alarm if the project gets out of hand. The flexible “as many details as necessary”-approach allows you to still plan your project as you go, making it also ideal for new management strategies such as Extreme Programming and Agile Project Management.

Collabtive is a modern Web application that allows teams to collaborate on projects, manage tasks, milestones, and files, and send instant messages to each other. It is multilanguage capable, supporting more than 20 languages. Collabtive integrates with other webservices via an XML API. It also provides importing functionality for data from other applications.

ProjectPier is a Free, Open-Source, self-hosted PHP application for managing tasks, projects and teams through an intuitive web interface. ProjectPier will help your organization communicate, collaborate and get things done. Its function is similar to commercial groupware/project management products, but allows the freedom and scalability of self-hosting.

Redmine is a flexible open source project management web application. Written using Ruby on Rails framework, it is cross-platform and cross-database. Key features include:

Multiple projects support

Flexible role based access control

Flexible issue tracking system

Gantt chart and calendar

News, documents & files management

Feeds & email notifications

Per project wiki

Per project forums

Time tracking

Custom fields for issues, time-entries, projects and users

SCM integration (SVN, CVS, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar and Darcs)

Issue creation via email

Multiple LDAP authentication support

User self-registration support

Multilanguage support

Multiple databases support

Conclusion

Project Management is one of the most important processes in designing and development of any project and selection of project management tool is sometimes critical. It entirely depends on your requirements as to whether you want to go for a web-based solution or a desktop one. Hence you need to consider the tool that is providing enough functionalities to cater your needs of project management.

Guest post by Muhammad Usama Alam, who is a software engineer and web developer with over 8 years of experience in designing and developing business solutions for enterprise. You can follow him on twitter.

45 Responses

This is a great list! There seem to be a lot of great project management tools available. Another strong small business project management solution is OnePlace. It has hierarchical projects and supports agile development. If you want to check it out, the URL is http://www.oneplacehome.com – maybe some other readers would find it beneficial as well.

Opengoo isn’t called Opengoo anymore. Now it’s Feng Office – just like the commercial version… although it is still possible to download it as open source.
This is a real underdog… IMO it’s a great web app that doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

Our company has been using Doolphy http://www.doolphy.com for some time now and we’re very happy with it. The application is in Beta version and can be used for free. There is no limit in the number of users or the number of reports that can be created. It is helping us a lot with the management of our tasks. I recommend it.

Our company has been using Doolphy http://www.doolphy.com for some time now and we’re very happy with it. The application is in Beta version and can be used for free. There is no limit in the number of users or the number of reports that can be created. It is helping us a lot with the management of our tasks. I recommend it.

In the desktop arena you misssed Open Workbench, excellent app. In the web based arena NetOffice Dwins is a good old app based in phpCollab. And in the development project management like RedMine and Opengoo, it is worth mentioning Code Spaces and Unfuddle…

These tools might work for freelancers wishing to manage projects on their own, but companies should looks elsewhere. If I’m not mistaken, none of these products offer reliable customer support (either by phone, web, etc…).

You can use it to manage and prioritize your goals, projects and tasks, set next actions and contexts, use checklists, schedules and a calendar.
Comes with a mobile version too, and with an Android app.

Managing a project plays crucial role in any process and its worth even to pay for project management software , i am sharing here one more web based project management tool which can help you a lot , http://www.project-drive.net/

Always hard to do a blog post like this when there are just so many good project management systems out there now, one of which I would like to think is our one http://www.teamworkpm.net

As much as I would love to say ours is the best, each tool has it’s strengths and weaknesses. It really come down to how you operate your business and trying to find the system the works the best for you and is the best fit your business.

Blog posts like this are great because it puts a lot of links in one place which helps to make finding a system which suits just a small bit easier.

I wanted to give my preferred PM tool a mention here. Dooster brilliantly combines all your PM tasks as well as email. Again as with those mentioned above you can increase and decrease users at any time too. http://www.dooster.net

It is an issue tracker for marketing content writers with features like inline content editing, content review, content verification and many more built into it and can prove to be an effective content collaboration tool for the teams in a web project.

Hi, great list but over a year old. Looking at all the comments could do with a rework? Suggest to include http://unifiedinbox.com as well – a great tool for the communication part of project management as it lets you share email accounts, folders and directly connects to project management web apps like Basecamp.